Description

Jeff Derstadt is a developer on the Entity Framework team, and in this video Erik visits Jeff to learn more about what he does day to day. Jeff and Erik talk about programming data, generally, and the Entity Framework development model, specifically. We learn about how Jeff got into software development, how/why he landed in the data world, things he's working on, his team's interaction with developer customers, providing the things users of EF need/want - like Code First-, and the software engineering processed employed by his broader development team, especially as it relates to the developer-tester relationship. Check out the latest Checking In with Erik Meijer.

@Home: I don't have a problem (well, everybody has problems...) and I have a lot to say. What do you mean, exactly? I was only curious why people were downvoting this piece. It doesn't seem logical to me given the quality and depth of conversation and the people involved in it... Nothing more. Nothing less.C

Very good interview, Charles. I can see the problem. You don't really know what customers are doing and what their needs are, so it is hard to design something like that. You touched on very interesting problems we had to deal with when deciding on what framework to use. And since there are more people with web scenarios I can see why Microsoft went that route, and I can see now why some of you would think important features for desktop development were postponed. Such as detaching entities or canceling save operations, or doing batch inserts/updates/deletes etc. Anyway, to give some feedback we just finished redesigning one of our internal apps. It was fairly small 3 databases and around 150 tables for all. Again we had to deal with legacy data. The next app on the horizon has 300+ tables and they are not ultra normalized. One table per type, in some case one table per derived type, but no more than 2 levels in the hierarchy, for the reasons mentioned in the interview, as you will need to do unions for complex searches. Thanks, that video was very helpful and I am glad you guys are trying hard to make it standout.

By the way...It would probably be a good idea to setup a separate page on Channel 9 or MSDN to poll for peoples' opinions. I've seen Microsoft does survey during some special events, but that hardly includes all the people out there.With MSDN on-line surveys for a specific technology you would get a larger crowd and more statistically diverse one too.Especially for BETA products I would definetely setup an on-line survey page to get people's feed back earlier in the life-cycle.May be you do have such surveys, but I have not seen it myself. I've seen the one where you need to answer a ton of generic questions about Microsoft as a company and it takes a long time.I would rather have it very technology or product specific so it is fast for users and narrow focused for MS Dev teams.Message boards are good, but not a good representation, but these boards can be used to develop questionnaires.

I like it. I finally found the feedback link all grayed out at the bottom. It is a gray thumbs up but when I mouse over it, it blushes gold. But the thumbsup turn down. Leaves me a bit nonplused. Ok there is only one thumb, but it does turn down..